14.10 — 19.11.2006

Mois européen de la photographie – Mutations 1

artist(s): AES & F, Philippe Ramette

curator(s): Paul di Felice, Pierre Stiwer

The European Month of Photography presents a series of exhibitions in Paris, Berlin, Vienna, Rome, Bratislava, Moscow and Luxembourg (at Casino Luxembourg and Chapelle du Rham) based on a common selection of artists representing the respective cities.

At the dawn of the third millennium photography is undergoing profound changes. With the emergence of new technologies, young artists have emancipated from their predecessors' traditions and rules. This tendency is reflected, among others, by their indistinct use of large-format photography, video and installations. Coming from the realm of painting, installation art or the visual arts at large, these artists have adopted new creative processes, as if the era of photography had ended with the conclusion of the 20th century.

Current photographic practices still bear the attitude, approach, process and sculptural means of traditional photography. But photography today plays with light, either by inscribing it chemically onto a sensitive surface or recreating images dot by dot. It thus functions like a mark in the flow of time, while unburdening itself of its commonly acknowledged task to represent.

The topic of mutation is closely linked to the question of post-photography, a decisive factor for the curators of the exhibition in Luxembourg as regards their choice of artists. In this context, the exhibition Mutations 1 installed at Casino Luxembourg presents works by AES&F (Tatiana Arzamasova, Lev Evzovich, Evgeny Svyatsky, Vladimir Fridkes) and Philippe Ramette.

The Moscow-based collective AES&F is showing large-scale pictures portraying children with blank stares, dressed in immaculate white, who dominate the scenery while adopting a "fashion-type" attitude. Their pristine demeanour appears to be at odds with their gestures, since they are shown manipulating weapons, which clearly do not belong to the realm of childhood.

Other contradictions of contemporary life - an environment where real and virtual worlds coexist on a permanent basis - are developed by the French artist Philippe Ramette by way of a sculptural and photographic approach of the notion of weightlessness. Implicating himself in each of his action-photographs, Ramette invents objects, devices and situations questioning our modes of thinking and perception. As opposed to digital trends, his analogue photographs become a pretext to all kinds of physical experiments and challenges for the artist who puts himself in extreme situations. Staging his own body as well as purpose-built objects, and despite the verifiable reality of his interventions, Ramette manages to cast doubts in unprepared spectators' minds.

Questioning a reinterpreted and "photographically" represented reality is a common feature in the propositions selected to illustrate this first edition of Mutations. The invited artists do not claim to belong to a particular school of thought - showing their works concurrently is thus an attempt to demonstrate the specific character of their respective approaches, while pointing to the prospective character of contemporary photography.